A good year for the Danish payment system

12 May 2016

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In their annual report on the so-called “payment infrastructure”, Danmarks Nationalbank assesses that Denmark has secure, stable and effective payment systems. The Danish Bankers Association and the banking sector are working specifically on creating payment solutions that keep up with the times. The recognition from Danmarks Nationalbank is welcomed.

The banking sector finances and is responsible for large parts of the pay-ment infrastructure in Denmark. Therefore, the joint banking sector in Denmark contributes towards ensuring that citizens can use their Dankort (Danish debit card) at the supermarket, pay rent via Betalingsservice (Danish direct debit), carry out account-to-account transfers on a daily basis or immediately transfer money with the help of mobile solutions such as Swipp and MobilePay.

Effective and secure payment solutions

The assessment of the payment infrastructure appears in Danmarks Na-tionalbank’s annual report “Overvågning af den finansielle infrastruktur” (Monitoring the financial infrastructure), which has just been published. It also states that the payment solutions live up to international standards and only minimal abuse occurs. This last point is particularly important for ensuring that citizens can trust the systems.

“We are delighted that Danmarks Nationalbank recognises the work that we do in the banking sector to provide Danes with secure and effective payment solutions,” says the Deputy Chief Executive at the Danish Bankers Association, Louise Mogensen.

She also highlights that the banking sector, with these solutions, supports financial institutions using their liquidity in the best possible way, which also benefits citizens and companies.

Solutions that keep up with the times

The Danish Bankers Association, together with additional actors in the payment area, continuously contributes towards further developing the payment infrastructure. This can be seen through, amongst other things, the introduction of immediate payments in 2014. Immediate payments enable money to be transferred instantaneously between customers. Examples of immediate payments include transfers via Swipp and MobilePay.

“We are working persistently to ensure that payment solutions support digital development in Denmark for the benefit of everyone. Customers have really taken to these payments and the number of transactions has doubled in the last year. We expect this development to continue,” Louise Mogensen concludes.

FACTS

Retail payment solutions in Denmark

A payment solution is used to start a payment, which afterwards will be liquidated in a retail payment system. The most significant retail payment systems in Denmark are clearing systems. The Danish Bankers Association is responsible for clearings. The clearing systems are used to exchange money between individual financial institutions via settlement accounts at Danmarks Nationalbank and Danmarks Nationalbank’s settlement system, Kronos.

The following payment solutions use the different clearing systems:

Sum Clearing

Paying-in slip

Dankort

Betalingsservice

Leverandørservice (Supplier Service)

International credit and debit cards

Intraday Clearing

Account-to-account transfers carried out as same day transfers or standard transfers

Transfer Services

Express Clearing

Account-to-account transfers of up to DKK 500,000 carried out as immedi-ate transfers

Swipp

MobilePay

Almost DKK 18 billion is transferred on average per day as account-to-account transfers in Express and Intraday Clearing. The transfers occur with 1 million transactions on average per day. From Quarter 1 of 2015 to Quarter 1 of 2016, the number of transactions in Express Clearing increased from 13.1 to 23.8 million and the overall value of the transactions increased from DKK 29.7 to 40.7 billion.The system supplier for clearing is Nets.